3 Reasons We Like to Control Time

Over the 4th of July my hubby took the kiddos to visit his parents. The day they left I planned a nice relaxing movie binge.

Then the power went out. At first I took it in stride and found a few other things I could do without electricity.

But as the hours passed (yes, in the end the power was out for 5 hours) I started to get frustrated and angry. I had plans dang it!

I wanted to do what I wanted to do – but I couldn’t!

This led me to wonder why we have this need to control time. If not the actual clock, then what we do with our time.

That lead me on a quest to find,

3 Reasons we like to control time –

We like certainty – When things are ambiguous our brains have to work harder to put the pieces together and figure out what is happening. We want to know what is coming next and be able to figure how to cope with it.

When we hit the entrepreneur stage there are so many things we don’t know. The uncertainty of not always knowing our next steps stresses us out and we tend to waste time figuring out what needs to happen next. This is why having a solid plan in place (and not deviating from it) will make take away the uncertainty.

We like to complete things – Psychology has long known that people like being able to cross things off our to-do list. When we something is crossed off it doesn’t take up space in our brains anymore (think about the brain dump you did once you finished a test in school).

In our minds (and maybe on paper) we have a list of things we want to accomplish. When we aren’t crossing things off that list, we begin to feel nervous about whether we will accomplish them or not. Our alarm bells go off and we can focus only on what we aren’t getting done. What we need to realize is that we will never finish our to-do, so it will still be there when we get back to it.

We like having autonomy – This is why we became entrepreneurs, right? We want to be in control of our destiny. Self-determination theory suggests that autonomy is one of our basic needs. When we are no longer able to do what we want and be who we want, we get the sense we aren’t living the live we want to.

When something unexpected crops up and we can’t do the things to move our business forward we feel stressed out. Learning to focus on the positives of what we are faced with in the moment can go a long way to helping us relax.

We would like to be the rulers of our world and never have to worry about how time influences. Unfortunately, that is isn’t always the case. However, we can learn ways to stress less. We can focus on a sense of exploration when things are not certain. Celebrating what we have accomplished will allow to focus less on the things we didn’t get done. Reaching autonomy means that we realize we have control over our reactions when we don’t have control over our situations.